Regular Expression to find a string included between two characters while EXCLUDING the delimiters

Question

I need to extract from a string a set of characters which are included between two delimiters  without returning the delimiters themselves   A simple example should be helpful   Target  extract the substring between square brackets  without returning the brackets themselves   Base string  This is a test string  more or less   If I use the following reg  ex            The match is  more or less   I need to get only more or less  without the brackets      Is it possible to do it

User · Answer

I had the same problem using regex with bash scripting. I used a 2-step solution using pipes with grep -o applying

 '\[(.*?)\]'

first, then

'\b.*\b'

Obviously not as efficient at the other answers, but an alternative.

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Here s a general example with obvious delimiters  X and Y      lt  X         Y   Here it s used to find the string between X and Y  Rubular example here  or see image

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Here is how I got without     and     in C            var text    This is a test string  more or less              Getting only string between     and             Regex regex   new Regex                        var matchGroups   regex Matches text           for  int i   0  i  lt  matchGroups Count  i                          Console WriteLine matchGroups i  Groups 1                The output is   more or less

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You just need to  capture  the bit between the brackets               To capture you put it inside parentheses   You do not say which language this is using   In Perl for example  you would access this using the  1 variable   my  string   This is the match  more or less     string                 print  match  1 n     Other languages will have different mechanisms  C   for example  uses the Match collection class  I believe

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PHP    string   This is the match  more or less    preg match                string   match   var dump  match 1

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Match any character that is not        Match 1 or more of the anything that is not    Creates groups of these matches          Positive lookahead    Matches a group ending with   without including it in the result   Done                  Proof   http   regexr com 3gobr  Similar to the solution proposed by null  But the additional    is not required  As an additional note  it appears   is not required to escape the   after the    For readability  I would leave it in   Does not work in the situation in which the delimiters are identical   more or less  for example

User · Answer

This one specifically works for javascript s regular expression parser                g  just run this in the console   var regex                 g  var str    This is a test string  more or less    var match   regex exec str   match

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To remove also the    use

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If you are using JavaScript  the solution provided by cletus     lt                 won t work because JavaScript doesn t support the lookbehind operator  Edit  actually  now  ES2018  it s possible to use the lookbehind operator  Just add   to define the regex string  like this  var regex       lt                    Old answer  Solution  var regex                var strToMatch    quot This is a test string  more or less  quot   var matched   regex exec strToMatch    It will return    quot  more or less  quot    quot more or less quot    So  what you need is the second value  Use  var matched   regex exec strToMatch  1    To return   quot more or less quot

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Most updated solution If you are using Javascript  the best solution that I came up with is using match instead of exec method  Then  iterate matches and remove the delimiters with the result of the first group using  1 const text    quot This is a test string  more or less    more  and  less  quot   const regex              gi  const resultMatchGroup   text match regex          more or less      more      less     const desiredRes   resultMatchGroup map match   gt  match replace regex   quot  1 quot    console log  quot desiredRes quot   desiredRes         more or less    more    less     As you can see  this is useful for multiple delimiters in the text as well

User · Answer

Easy done      lt                   Technically that s using lookaheads and lookbehinds  See Lookahead and Lookbehind Zero-Width Assertions  The pattern consists of    is preceded by a   that is not captured  lookbehind   a non-greedy captured group  It s non-greedy to stop at the first    and is followed by a   that is not captured  lookahead     Alternatively you can just capture what s between the square brackets               and return the first captured group instead of the entire match

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I wanted to find a string between   and    but   is sometimes optional   Here is the regex I use        lt

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If you need extract the text without the brackets  you can use bash awk  echo    hola mundo      awk -F         print  2    result   hola mundo

[regex] Regular Expression to find a string included between two characters while EXCLUDING the delimiters

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